Recommended Books on Cultural Geography
Anderson, Kay, Mona Domosh, Steve Pile, and Nigel Thrift (eds.). 2003. Handbook of Cultural Geography. London: Sage Publications. An edited collection of essays that push the boundaries of cultural geography into such subdisciplines as economic, social, and political geography.
Conzen, Michael P. (ed.). 2010. The Making of the American Landscape, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. A collection of essays examining environmental and cultural forces, from early American Indian landscapes to contemporary landscapes of mass culture, that have shaped the visual character and geographical diversity of settled America.
Cosgrove, Denis. 1998. Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. The landmark study that outlines the relationships between the idea of landscape and social and class formation in such places as Italy, England, and the United States.
Foote, Kenneth E., Peter J. Hugill, Kent Mathewson, and Jonathan M. Smith (eds.). 1994. Re-Reading Cultural Geography. Austin: University of Texas Press. A beautifully compiled representative collection of some of the best works in American cultural geography at the end of the twentieth century and a useful companion to the book edited by Wagner and Mikesell.
Goudie, Andrew. 2000. The Earth Transformed: An Introduction to Human Impacts on the Environment, 5th ed. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press. A fine introduction to the theme of cultural ecology—in particular, habitat modification—as viewed by a British geographer.
Mitchell, Don. 1999. Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction. New York: Blackwell. An introductory text on cultural geography that emphasizes the material and political elements of the discipline.
Oakes, Timothy S., and Patricia L. Price (eds.). 2008. The Cultural Geography Reader. New York: Routledge. A collection of 52 classic and contemporary readings in cultural geography that discusses key geographic concepts and their connections to other disciplines and academic traditions from both the United States and the United Kingdom.
Radcliffe, Sarah (ed.). 2006. Culture and Development in a Globalizing World: Geographies, Actors, and Paradigms. London: Routledge. A series of essays that provide case studies from around the world showing the various ways that culture and economic development are integrally related.
Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1974. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. A Chinese-born geographer’s innovative and imaginative look at people’s attachment to place, a central concern of the cultural approach to human geography.